In the video, posted last year, a group of twentysomething women stand in a circle in an open-plan office, the sort of blandly unassuming place that can be found in any city in the world. You know the look: the lights are scouring and fluorescent; the palate is a slush of tans and grays. Angular windows and ergonomic chairs are visible in the background. The women are dressed in forgettably fashionable clothing. “Five-foot-three and an attitude!” one chants. “Five-foot-three and an attitude!” Another shrieks, “Gen-Z boss and a mini! Gen-Z boss and a mini!” 

That these women are employees of an Australian skincare company does not matter. That they are not in the least representative of women in the American workforce — in which more than three times as many are nurses or teachers than “managers” of any kind — matters even less. 

For a certain kind of right-wing man on the internet, these women and their viral TikTok video embody everything that’s wrong with America, regardless of who and where they actually are. “Tariffs or this? Tariffs,” a right-wing influencer wrote on X when he reshared the offending clip in April, referencing the catastrophic trade policies announced by the Trump administration just days prior. Thirteen thousand people liked the post, affirming the notion that a global economic collapse would be worth it, if only obnoxious women with entry-level corporate jobs might be forced back into the domestic sphere. What gives rise to this sort of reaction — what makes women yelping about their miniskirts and their Gen-Z bosses more than an irritation and inflates them into a harbinger of civilizational decline — is not what they do, but what they denote. Misogyny converts reality into crude symbolism. 

To themselves, these women are five-foot-three with an attitude; to reactionaries on X, they are the face of the feminization of modern work. Their imagined cultural dominance results from the decimation of a model that was only ever prevalent from the fifties to seventies, and only ever for a small segment of the middle class. In this model, the nuclear family subsisted on a single income, which was awarded to men (and then distributed to wives) in exchange for manual labor. Nonetheless, the right persists in maintaining that it is natural and proper for women to stay at home having babies while men toil in factories, building things with their hands. J.D. Vance, who has railed against “childless cat ladies,” has also opposed state-subsidized childcare precisely because he believes women should be incentivized to stay home with their children. As Vish Burra, erstwhile director of operations for disgraced former Representative George Santos, explained in a bizarrely formatted X post circulating the same clip: 

Men in America don’t need therapy.
Men in America need tariffs and DOGE.
The fake email jobs will disappear.
Competing with women like this for REAL JOBS will be over.
Kitchens will be filled and sandwiches will be made.
Fertility rates will go to the moon.

In the right-wing imagination, the disappearance of industrial jobs and the resulting reshuffling of the workplace is an essentially spiritual — indeed, an existential — predicament. What is at stake in the emergence of women who send emails all day is the very vitality of the culture. “The problem is not just one of technology or the chattering class’s petty moralism,” writes the editor of the fascist publisher Passage Press on Substack, “but a spiritual emptiness that has hollowed modern life to its core.” He continues grandiosely, “a world that gets mapped according to the spreadsheets does not lend itself to the sublime. Great men, and the veneration they inspire, have no place here.” 

Women, of course, cannot be great men. They are small-souled and fond of spreadsheets; they work in corporate middle management and post about drinking matcha lattes. As Andrea Dworkin observed in the eighties, men often take women to be “essentially small, picky, good with details, bad with ideas.” Female intelligence is that of the bureaucrat, who rules via the passive aggression of expertise rather than the active and ennobling aggression of force and conquest. Email jobs are female-coded precisely because they are anonymous and unheroic; hence DOGE’s hostility to what is sometimes styled, not coincidentally, as the “nanny state,” often denigrated as a feminine mode of governance — both insofar as its employees are effete emailers and insofar as it feminizes citizens by coddling them. That more men than women staffed what was once the federal government, at least as of 2023, is yet another irksome detail that does not conform to the narrative and therefore does not matter. In fact, caring about the piddling empirical truth, rather than the greater spiritual truth, is symptomatic of a bureaucratic and deplorably feminine mind.

The girlboss and her Gen-Z descendants — the women who film the day-in-the-life-of-a-corporate-girlie TikToks that men on X love to hate — are loathsome to reactionaries because they are a personification of modernity itself: its cosmopolitanism, its abandonment of the nuclear family, its licentiousness, its crass commercialism. The girlboss is therefore, in some respects, heir to the European Jew — not, I hasten to add, because she is oppressed to nearly the same extent, but because she, too, is interpreted as a living avatar of liberalism’s sterility.

The comparison is not entirely unprecedented. Betty Friedan likened the plight of the sixties housewife to that of the Jew during the Holocaust: she went so far as to call the suburban home a “comfortable concentration camp.” Dworkin, not famed for her subtlety, wrote in the Zionist polemic Scapegoat that both women and Jews must take up arms against their oppressors. But one distinction between me and my feminist forebears is that I have the good sense to heavily qualify such a perilous analogy. Another is that I make it on a very different basis. Girlbosses do not resemble European Jewry, to my mind, because they are as downtrodden as the eventual victims of the Nazis, or because they should militarize. (For what it’s worth, I don’t think Jews, much less Israelis, should militarize.) Rather, girlbosses are like Jews insofar as they, too, are taken by their enemies to be embodiments of an era and a tendency. 

In his great monograph about the intellectual origins of the Third Reich, The Politics of Cultural Despair, the historian Fritz Stern notes that for proto-Nazi illiberals, the “villain usually was the Jew, who more and more frequently came to be depicted as the very incarnation of modernity.” Like the girlboss, who moves to the big city and freezes her eggs, the modern assimilated Jew “has no religion, no character, no home, no children.” He is rootless, untethered from tradition, and he, too, is a traitor to his designated gender. Whereas he is effeminate, intellectual when he should be muscular, white-collar when he should be blue, a reader when he should be an athlete, she is impermissibly androgynous — masculine enough to support herself via gainful employment, yet not masculine enough for manual labor. She works for remuneration, like a man, but her form of work is so feminizing that it is softening the whole of the culture. Both figures are intolerable affronts to fetishists of rigid gender norms.

One might object that Jewishness of the sort the proto-Nazis reviled was a fantasy, whereas girlbosses really exist, and even go so far as to evangelize on behalf of their lifestyle in books with pathetic titles like Lean In and #GIRLBOSS. It is obviously true that capitalistic fervor is not an ethnic identity — and just as obviously true that the contemporary right’s goal is not to kill women off but to force them into the home (and to compel them to procreate). But despite these important differences, the girlboss and the Jew are both cast as emblems of a debased form of life.     

And now, as then, there is some truth to the accusations against the group in question. Late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Jews really were proponents of liberalism (which prohibited their centuries-long persecution), secularism (which allowed them the dubious comforts of cultural assimilation), and capitalism (a system that allowed them some respite from the pogroms they endured when they were largely concentrated in isolated rural communities). “Where else but in the cities, in the free professions, in an open society, could they escape from the restrictions and prejudices that lingered on from the closed, feudal society of an earlier period?” Stern asks. 

Just as liberalism and secularism really did protect European Jewry from violence and harassment — for a time — the sexual revolution and the entry of women into the workforce really have freed us from the patriarchal prison of the domestic sphere, at least to some extent, by allowing us to emulate our entrepreneurial male tormenters; and just as Jews’ success in the marketplace could not ultimately save them from the genocidal fury of the Nazis, the girlboss’s millions cannot save her (to say nothing of the rest of us) from the sexists who believe that a woman’s only job is to breed. The Nazis and their ideological forebears rejected liberalism and secularism, so, naturally, they also rejected the Jews’ attempts to use these forces as shields. The wealthy urban Jews who sought to distance themselves from the Ostjuden, the more visibly poor and rural Jews from the shtetls of Eastern Europe, soon discovered that the two groups were equally worthless in the eyes of anti-Semites. To a true chauvinist — and there are plenty of these in the Trump coalition — both a girlboss and a trad wife are sub-human pregnancy machines.

Thus assimilation, that other familiar strategy, cannot protect us any better than it protected the Jews. Yet this is the dominant liberal response to the second Trump presidency, at least as far as gender is concerned. Roughly four months in, the predominant successor to the Resistance Feminism of pussy hats and bland affirmations seems to be something that is, improbably, worse: resignation, accompanied by exhortations to embrace superficially softened forms of misogyny. Gavin Newsom tells us on his podcast to exclude trans women from women’s sports; Elizabeth Bruenig writes in The Atlantic that we need a leftist pronatalism. But to concede that trans women are not women, or that women who do not want children should be talked into having them, is to concede too much.

If anti-Semitism is the proverbial socialism of fools, then rage against the twentysomething groundlings who work at an Australian skincare company is the socialism of morons. And the socialism of morons does not become the socialism of intelligent people — that is, socialism proper — if it accepts the premises of its enemies. Until we address the real cause of widespread dissatisfaction, our solutions remain palliative. The vitriol directed at women with an attitude and a mini is a matter of misplaced hatred for bullshit jobs in general, for the glut of unfulfilling work that both women and men must undertake to pay their bills, for a cultural configuration that feels devoid of purpose and compassion and that accords us almost no agency over the conditions of our lives. 

The problem is not the entirety of modernity, or that women aspire to meaningful employment, or that not enough of them aspire to motherhood. The problem is that almost no one has the imagination to answer the question “Tariffs or this?” correctly. 

The right answer is: neither. The right answer is: something else altogether.